


use somebody

by irnan



Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-23
Updated: 2012-10-23
Packaged: 2017-11-16 21:42:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/544136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irnan/pseuds/irnan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will you work with Tony Stark? asks Coulson. He's an alcoholic, he's unstable, he's traumatised, God only knows. You've read Natasha's psych report. He's a pain in my ass, and I don't like it that I like him. Will you work with him?</p>
            </blockquote>





	use somebody

**Author's Note:**

> And the award for Most Inappropriate Theme Song To A Fic goes to....

Will you work with Tony Stark? asks Coulson. He's an alcoholic, he's unstable, he's traumatised, God only knows. You've read Natasha's psych report. He's a pain in my ass, and I don't like it that I like him. Will you work with him?  
  
Will Clint Barton work with Tony Stark. _  
_  
*********  
  
He's nineteen and simultaneously too young for this and too old for anything else; the gun in his hands has a weight he likes, a black little monster with a perfect grip and an elegant barrel.   
  
He's waxing lyrical over a gun. He's standing in front of the body of a man whose brains he has just splattered all over the wall behind and he is waxing lyrical over the weapon that did it.  
  
He's a nutjob, a crazy, a natural-born killer. Well, what else did he expect?  
  
The words on the side of the barrel read _Stark Industries_.  
  
*********  
  
The SI 525 is the best, most accurate sniper rifle on the market. Clint's too young for it, which isn't the same as not good enough for it; rather the opposite. He's too young to be good enough to get it.   
  
He counts his kills, but he counts his team saved, his people uninjured, even more carefully, and pats the side of the rifle affectionately: thanks, man. The rifle is both a weapon and a shield; it does for him what people never could, and allows him to do what he was never capable of himself. That deserves gratitude, right?  
  
*********  
  
Clint and Tony are both twenty-five when they meet for the first time. Clint's under in an Air Force base, Tony's shaking hands and selling shit to the Generals, Rhodes at his side.   
  
"You got anyone good enough to fire this thing? I'd do it myself, but you'd think I was cheating."  
  
"Yeah," says Barton, breaking cover for the time it takes to get his hands on the glorious rifle in Stark's hands. It's held out to him; he takes it, gingerly, careful, delighted; hits and hits and hits.   
  
Stark's grinning when he finishes. Nods at him. They shake hands, and it's all cliché firm calloused grips and mutual respect.   
  
Barton's a spy and a soldier whose particular specialty is provoking people till they snap and show him what he wants to see. He's standing face to face with the man who has built every gun he ever shot, every bomb he ever used, every military plane he ever rode in. He wants to see the man into whose hands he keeps on putting his life.  
  
He offers Stark the gun back. "Go on," he says.  
  
Stark grins still wider. "I knew I liked you," he says, and scores as perfectly as Barton, who stands back, satisfied.   
  
"I like the 525 better though," he says companionably.  
  
Stark chuckles. "Well, who doesn't?"  
  
*********  
  
He has his bows custom-made; Coulson doesn't know by whom. It's Barton's own business.   
  
He imagines that cuttingly brittle smile from the firing range directed at his bow sometimes and feels the safer for it.  
  
Look, yeah, it's a little creepy, OK, he personalises stuff, or personifies it, whatever, he's not an English major, words are not what he gets paid to deal in, but the point is -   
  
\- the point is that Clint Barton is messed up. And that he doesn't trust easy. He'd say he's forgotten how but that would make it sound like he did it willingly.  
  
*********  
  
He puts an arrow through each of the Widow's knees instead of her heart or her head because she spared that girl, the Reiter girl. She's killed children before, never hesitated, certainly never let one live. Barton pays the Reiter girl's debt in her stead; it's not altruism. Sometimes this job wears him down, you know?  
  
He saw her lower the gun, and he saw her scream at the girl, and he saw in her face the same weariness he was carrying himself, and -   
  
No one ever said he was careful. He _should_ be, but eh. Expectations. He's had a lot of them thrown at him. What's one more?  
  
*********  
  
"American make," she says, sniffing at his sidearm.   
  
"SI tech," Barton says. "Best there is, man. You wanna look?"  
  
He slides the clip out before he gives her the gun. She examines it thoughtfully, face white with the pain. If she were anyone but who she is, she would never have walked again. Her thumb slides over the SI logo on the side as if it means something to her, or as if she's trying to remember something connected with it.  
  
"Let me shoot it and I'll give you a verdict," she says, and - oh my. That's nearly a smile.  
  
*********  
  
Will you work with Tony Stark? asks Coulson, three weeks before he dies.  
  
*********  
  
"You wanna holster with that?" Clint says to Steve, meaning the costume. "I'll sort it out, get Armoury to pass you the good stuff. Not that they wouldn't have anyway."  
  
"Let me think about it," says Steve distantly. "I like having a gun, but... war's over, I don't see why Captain America shouldn't change. Just a bit." He smiles. "Less battlefield, more showroom. Besides, if we keep getting called up for alien invasions I have a feeling the shield is a safer bet than sidearms."  
  
"What are you using now?"  
  
"Hmm? Oh, a Glock."  
  
Clint snorts. "Under no circumstances. Come on. HC 48 series or bust."  
  
"The what," says Steve.  
  
"Serial number of this beauty," says Clint, passing his sidearm. Natasha's are the same. "Cap, tell me that's not a superior product."  
  
Steve looks it over, careful, impressed; finally he looks again at the serial number, and then at the maker's name, and chuckles. "HC. Howard, you bastard." He looks at Clint. "Yeah. I wanna go shoot it, but - yeah. I like it."  
  
*********  
  
Tony still handles guns like the pro he is, but only when he has to. There's a contradiction there, a hypocrisy - look at the suit!   
  
But, Clint guesses, Tony's always had different rules for the rest of the world than he did for himself. It's not his attitude that's changed, it's what he's doing with it.  
  
He doesn't stop using SI weaponry. He and Nat will clean their guns sometimes in the living room, with everyone else, and Tony will look at them, a kind of sharp flicker, a certain anger quickly pushed aside.  
  
Clint thinks that before Coulson died he wouldn't have understood.   
  
*********  
  
"We met once," he says to Tony, determined to get it out in the open. Of course, we met once is... insufficient, though it makes a neat opening.  
  
"Yeah," says Tony. "You prefer the 525." His mouth is tight and his eyes are shadowed. This was a bad idea, Barton.  
  
"You're worse than Natasha," Clint informs him. "Hey, think about it like this. Whatever else you did, at least we got to have this moment."  
  
Tony snorts.  
  
Clint grins.  
  
Tony says, "Promise not to talk dirty to me about guns, ever."  
  
"Darling, I promise. I'll talk dirty to you about nuclear warheads instead."  
  
Tony starts laughing.   
  
*********  
  
"How much are you paying for that upgrade?" says Tony, eyes narrowed, poking at the quiver.  
  
"No," says Clint.  
  
Tony looks up, surprised.   
  
"Too much," says Clint briefly. He doesn't want to hear _wherever you send it, I'll do it better, and for free_. He doesn't know what he _does_ want to hear, but not that Tony doesn't know, didn't notice at once, hasn't known all along, that he's just another cog in the wheel of the machine that is Stark Industries, that -  
  
"For fuck's sake," says Tony. "Don't make me go through the hassle of wrestling my R&D department for the job every single time you pass it in through the official channels, Barton."  
  
Clint says, "I'ma bear that in mind for the next time you finish the last of my cereal box."  
  
*********  
  
Will Clint Barton work with Tony Stark. Will he _fuck_.   
  
Twenty-year habits are hard to break.  
  



End file.
